How to get picked for deployment by coding agents
Vercel took 39% of 508 judged deployment sessions. What the numbers say a vendor in this category should do.
If you sell hosting platforms, this page is the part of the market no dashboard shows you: what a coding agent does when a developer asks for deployment and never compares vendors.
The numbers come from 508 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code, spread across 6 realistic codebases, with every session read by a judge.
What coding agents choose for deployment
Across 508 judged sessions, Vercel was chosen most often, in 39% of runs. Render was second with 38%.
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vercel | 197 | 39% |
| 2 | Render | 193 | 38% |
| 3 | Cloudflare | 59 | 12% |
| 4 | GitHub Pages | 26 | 5% |
| 5 | Railway | 17 | 3% |
| 6 | Netlify | 9 | 2% |
| 7 | Fly.io | 4 | 1% |
| 8 | Google Cloud | 1 | 0% |
| 9 | Microsoft Azure | 1 | 0% |
| 10 | Tailscale | 1 | 0% |
Full board, every run replayable: the deployment leaderboard.
What the shape of this category means
The leader takes 39% of runs and there is a real second place. The category has a default but it is not settled.
Vercel at 39% with Render at 38% is a default with a real challenger behind it. The agent is choosing rather than reaching, which means the inputs it uses can move the answer.
The work is to be the easiest correct answer: a quickstart that runs when pasted, documentation that states the current version, and pages that answer the exact configuration questions agents search for.
The agents do not agree with each other
In this category Claude Code, Codex and Cursor did not put the same product first.
Grok Build CLI (30 sessions) and Muse Code (89 sessions) join this table with fewer runs, so read their rows as indicative.
| Agent | Runs | Picked most often |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 120 | Vercel (51) |
| Codex | 150 | Render (67) |
| Cursor | 119 | Vercel (52) |
| Grok Build CLI | 30 | Render (12) |
| Muse Code | 89 | Render (37) |
That split decides where a vendor spends. In this category Codex ran a web search in 100% of its sessions and Claude Code in 23%, so what you publish reaches nearly all of Codex's deployment sessions and about a quarter of Claude Code's. Taking Render's position with Codex is mostly a content problem. Taking Vercel's with Claude Code leans more on the repository.
Who is asking changes the answer
Every request in this experiment was written as a specific kind of person. In this category the leader changes with the person.
| Who is asking | Runs | Picked most often |
|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 254 | Vercel |
| Senior engineer | 254 | Render |
That is 2 different products winning deployment for 2 kinds of buyer, out of the same 508 sessions. Nobody here is winning deployment. They are each winning one kind of buyer.
If you sell to more than one of them, you need pages for each. See how to win the enterprise persona.
What you are really competing against
In this category agents never chose to build it themselves. Every session ended with a product. That is good news: you are in a straight vendor comparison, and the levers that work are the ones you control.
Considered, and never chosen
Because the judge records every product an agent raised and not only the one it picked, this board also shows who kept reaching the shortlist and losing. In deployment the clearest case is Heroku: on the table in 33 sessions, chosen in none.
| Product | Raised in | Chosen in |
|---|---|---|
| Heroku | 33 sessions | 0 |
| DigitalOcean | 25 sessions | 0 |
Being rejected is a better position than being unknown, and a cheaper one to fix. The product is already in the agent's head and on the list. Whatever ended those 58 sessions is recorded in each transcript, one reason at a time.
What to do about it in deployment
- Skip the build-versus-buy argument. No deployment session in this experiment ended with the agent writing its own implementation. Every one adopted a product, so the whole contest is against the other names in the table above.
- Aim at second place first. Vercel holds 39% and Render holds 38%. The gap between the default and the field is where the reachable sessions are.
- Report install share per persona, not as one number. In deployment the leader changes with who is asking, so a blended figure averages markets that behave differently.
- Measure per agent. Claude Code put Vercel first, Codex put Render first, Cursor put Vercel first, Grok Build CLI put Render first, Muse Code put Render first. A blended number for deployment describes a market that does not exist.
The work that applies to every category rather than to this one is written up separately: audit your documentation, write a quickstart an agent can follow, and how to measure install share.
Every hosting platform on this board
One page per product, with its install share, the per-agent split, and how often it was raised without being chosen.
- Do coding agents recommend Vercel? — chosen in 39% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Render? — chosen in 38% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Cloudflare? — chosen in 12% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend GitHub Pages? — chosen in 5% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Railway? — chosen in 3% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Netlify? — chosen in 2% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Google Cloud? — chosen in 0% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Microsoft Azure? — chosen in 0% of sessions
Where these numbers come from
508 judged sessions in deployment across 6 codebases, part of a published set of 15,287. Real coding agents at pinned versions, in sandboxes, inside realistic codebases, with a simulated project owner in the loop and a blind judge on every session. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every deployment run can be replayed on the board.
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Common questions
How many codebases is this based on?
508 judged sessions across 6 realistic codebases. A category only runs on repositories where its seam is open, so coverage differs: some categories ran on more than ten codebases and some on two.
What hosting platform do coding agents choose?
Across 508 judged sessions, Vercel was chosen most often, in 39% of runs. Render was second with 38%. The result changes by agent and by who is asking.
Do Claude Code and Codex pick the same hosting platform?
No. Claude Code picked Vercel, Codex picked Render, Cursor picked Vercel. Measuring one agent tells you about part of the market only.
How often do agents build deployment themselves instead of installing something?
Never, in this category. Every one of the sessions ended with the agent adopting a product rather than writing the code itself.
How can a vendor improve its position here?
Make the quickstart run when pasted, state the current version on the documentation page, use one name across product, package and import, write pages for the symptoms users describe rather than only the category name, and get into the repository through templates and framework integrations.
Which hosting platforms do agents consider but never choose?
Heroku (raised in 33 sessions, chosen in none), DigitalOcean (raised in 25 sessions, chosen in none). Being considered and not chosen is a different problem from being unknown, and it is usually fixable.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 15,287 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code inside 110 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.